Thursday, March 28, 2013

When the funeral home director called and asked if I’d do a
“Buddhist portion” for a service with a Christian minister, I thought, “No
problem,” since I’ve participated in several mixed faith services before. Last
year I did chanting at two Christian memorial services – the ministers I worked
with were both progressive-minded women who welcomed my participation. But this
time the experience was quite different.

After the funeral director e-mailed me the information, I
spoke with the widow a couple times over the phone. She said she and all of her
husband’s family are Christian, but her husband told her he became Buddhist
during his time in the army. The widow didn’t know what sect her husband
joined. All she knew is he said he was unable to find a similar group when he
returned to Chicago. I looked up his army base on-line and saw the nearby
groups were Soka Gakkai (Japanese Lotus Sutra), a Korean Zen and a Thai
Theravada temple – groups that can be easily found all over the Chicago area.

I explained to the widow about the custom of offering
incense during the chanting. She said she and a few of the relatives would be
willing to offer incense in honor of her husband. So at the funeral I explained
to the attendees that the chanting (Tan Butsu Ge) was about praising the
deceased and that he will be their guide and teacher in helping them to more
deeply appreciate the lives around them. After the chanting, I delivered a
brief Dharma message. I said I couldn’t explain much about Buddhism in a few
minutes but I speculated that maybe one teaching that attracted Adolfo, the
deceased, was the idea of Oneness. In seeing all lives, all events and things
as Oneness, Buddhism has no quarrel with other religions and honors the value
of every one and every moment, no matter how unpleasant they may seem at first.

After my talk I went to sit down among the crowd and the
pastor, a 30-ish man with a fashionably cropped beard came to the podium and
proceeded to blast away at everything I said. He spoke with the urgency of
someone administering the antidote to a snake-bite victim – the poison must be
decisively counteracted before it can spread and do damage. He exhorted
everyone in the room to hear the call of Jesus and join the exclusive group of
those who would be saved by Him and have all their sins washed away.

Following the minister’s sermon and prayer, relatives and
friends were asked to come up and share their stories of Adolfo. I lost count
of all the people who spoke but the testimonies went on for an hour and a half.
A couple people were the like the minister, expressing their concern that
Adolfo had turned away from Christianity and also like the minister, they wanted
to believe that in his last days Adolfo had shown signs of accepting Jesus and
was now in Heaven in the embrace of the Lord.

All the others who spoke did not touch on specifically
religious matters as they testified to how Adolfo went out of his way to help
many relatives and friends and significantly changed their lives. Sometimes it
was just being there for someone going through a painful time and for others,
it was his encouragement to dedicate themselves to go deeper into their studies
and artistic endeavors.

Although the minister reiterated the standard Protestant
line that salvation is gained only through faith in Jesus and not by any good
works, it became obvious to me that Adolfo was someone who didn’t need to be
“saved.” The devout Christians who felt anxiety over whether Adolfo found true
faith are not much different from the Jodo Shinshu people I’ve heard saying
they worried about whether their loved ones had enough shinjin for birth in the Pure Land.

It is a reflection of our ego-attachment that we want to
have assurance that our loved ones came around to our view of qualifying for
afterlife paradise. Shinran, on the other hand, felt that he wasn’t in a
position to pull people closer to salvation – in fact, he felt that many people
around him were actually bodhisattvas (beings of “bodhi,” seeking/attaining
awakening) in disguise (gonke, “manifested
forms”). Like the characters in the Contemplation Sutra, those disguised
bodhisattvas were there to guide him to awakening through inspiring acts or
through giving him challenges to work through. It is they who take on the
responsibility of guiding me to spiritual liberation – not the other way
around.

Although I didn’t have the privilege of knowing Adolfo,
listening to all the stories about him made me see him as a bodhisattva for me
as well as for the many people attending the service. In his short life (he
died from an accident), he accomplished much in awakening people to the
interconnectedness of life – for example, for a cousin to pursue her career in
drama, not to become a famous actress but to affect the lives of people through
art. Most memorial services I’ve attended were for elderly people, but this
crowd was of the age group that you see dancing the night away at weddings. They
unselfconsciously quoted Adolfo and his friends in X-rated language from their
conversations, phone calls and text messages.

Despite how the Christian minister shot up my talk, I think
of the service as a hoji – Dharma
event. Maybe in some way Adolfo has called at least one person, in the near or
far future, to seek the path of Oneness, to go beyond the mindset of condemning
the “unsaved.”